Faster and faster

par Mona Chollet,
janvier 2013

The Spanish novelist (and economist) Fernando Trías de Bes, who knows that people have little time for reading, once wrote a short story full of abbreviations [1], following the tribulations of AG (Average Guy). AG works for a multinational, with the important job of hiding suppliers’ invoices so that they have to resubmit them. This task, which pays the mortgage on the family home, leaves him little time (T) for the secret passion that has obsessed him since childhood : studying red-headed termites (or rather, Rd-Hded Trmtes).

Having calculated that he would need to work another 35 years to pay off his mortgage, AG decides to resign and make his fortune with a brilliant idea, selling what he and his contemporaries most desire : T. He launches with little bottles of “five minutes” that sell like hot cakes, then goes up-market with cartons of “two hours” ; but his commercial genius has unforeseen social and political consequences.

The fable illustrates debt’s function as “time-theft” and shows the advanced state of “time poverty” [2] in western society, which, blinded by the cachet attached to frenetic lifestyles, and trapped in a particular conception of human activity and destiny, may underestimate the essential “good” that time represents, and devalue it.

German sociologist Hartmut Rosa believes there is a “time regime”, owing nothing to chance, behind our individual conception of time as a given, or as a representation of the vagaries of individual existence. He identifies three recent kinds of acceleration, working in combination : technical acceleration (the internet, high-speed trains, microwave ovens) ; social acceleration (more frequent changes of job and partner, possessions replaced more often) ; and an accelerated pace of life (we sleep less, talk more quickly, communicate less with those around us, and multi-task). Technical acceleration should, logically, make our lives less stressed ; but, though each process takes less time, technological advances multiply the number of processes. It’s quicker to write an email than a letter, but we write many more emails than we wrote letters ; it’s faster to travel by car, but as we make more journeys we spend the same amount of time travelling. The explosion in the number of invitations and possibilities — to consume, enjoy leisure activities, use the net, watch television — means more decision-making, which eats up our time.

‘A totalitarian force’

Rosa believes the historical phenomenon of acceleration was initially driven by western societies, to which it promised long-desired progress and autonomy. But now acceleration has short-circuited institutions and political structures and become a “totalitarian force within modern society” — an abstract, ubiquitous principle no one can escape. People feel they are just keeping up, if that, without ever being able to gain perspective on their existence ; political communities lose their control over their destiny. The rush is accompanied by feelings of inertia and fatalism.

The politically progressive do not always recognise time as the prize over which a strategic battle is being fought, but it has become a contentious, very unequally distributed, resource. In France, the Aubry laws on working hours gave white-collar workers extra holiday but destabilised the lives of low-skilled workers, who were required to be more flexible. Personal services agencies — one called Du Temps Pour Moi (Time for Me) — allow the well-off to subcontract child-minding or household tasks to (generally female) employees, who are likely to be poor and/or immigrants. Their time is treated with contempt, as is that of the poor and the unemployed, who are made to queue for their benefits, only to be told to come back tomorrow [3]. There’s inequality in being unavailable : “Because he’s the boss, our manager turns off his phone whenever it suits him,” an employee complains. “But the people who report to him, the workers, get an earful if they do the same” [4].

Women are subject to particular time pressures. Last July the Belgian feminist movement, Vie Féminine, devoted its annual study week to this problem and, in a statement of intent entitled “Let’s Take Back Control of Our Time”, noted that women, besides doing most of the household tasks, are the “shock absorbers” of time in the workplace, where they often work part-time, and at home, where they are responsible for organising the timetable of family life. They are also victims of “an enduring sexist mindset that equates femininity with devotion to other people”. A nurse says : “I always have the feeling I’m neglecting someone when I do something for myself” [5].

Relentless rhythm of collective life

Official working hours have been declining in the modern era, yet over the last few decades the pace of work has intensified and started to invade the personal lives of workers. Individuals have more free time, but that doesn’t make them immune to the relentless rhythm of collective life [6]. Rosa says they often spend their leisure time on activities they perceive as having little value, such as watching television, but are too inhibited to do what they really want to do.

The problem with time is not just quantitative, it’s also qualitative : we no longer know how best to occupy it, to master it. Our conception of time comes from an originally Protestant, capitalist ethic, now largely secularised : time as an abstract resource that must be “turned to profit as intensively as possible” [7]. The British historian E P Thompson wrote about the resistance of the first generations of those subjected to a working day defined by the clock, siren or time sheet, rather than the task to be accomplished [8]. With this came the loss of the spontaneous alternation between periods of intense activity and periods of idleness, which Thompson considered to be our innate human rhythm. Strict division of time governed discipline in factories, and in the schools that aimed to break in the future workforce : in 1775 in Manchester the Reverend J Clayton disapproved of streets infested with “idle ragged children ; who are not only losing their Time but learning habits of gaming.”

The repressiveness of the enterprise becomes clear when the theologian Richard Baxter suggests that everyone — in an age before watches were common — should live by their “interior moral time-piece”. In Germany in 2005 the Christian Democrat justice minister in Hesse proposed “keeping an eye on the unemployed” using “electronic handcuffs”, to re-educate them in “living according to a normal timetable” [9].

The logic of competition and profit (“the competition never sleeps”) has spread to all areas of life. Free time, more precious because it has to be earned, must be managed efficiently. But reluctance to risk wasting it exacts a high price at both ends of the social scale : “The exploited have no more chance of devoting themselves unreservedly to idleness than the exploiters,” writes Raoul Vaneigem [10]. According to Rosa, to regain a grip on our collective and individual history, we must free up time for play, and relearn how to misuse time, since what is at stake is the possibility of “appropriating the world” ; if we lose that, then the world becomes “silent, cold, indifferent and even hostile.”

Alice Médigue writes of a “phenomenon of disappropriation”, which keeps people estranged from the world and their own existence [11]. Before the reign of the clock — which, according to Pierre Bourdieu, Algerian peasants called the “devil’s mill” — ways of measuring time linked human beings naturally to their bodies and their physical environment. According to Thompson, Burmese monks got up when there was enough light to see the veins on their hands. In Madagascar, an instant was defined as the time it took to fry a grasshopper.

The roots of the time crisis go deep into the history of modernity, and superficial solutions won’t resolve it. We should be cautious in our response to the European slow movement : Slow Food for gastronomy, Slow Media for journalism, Cittaslow for urbanism. In the US, Stewart Brand is supervising the construction of a “Clock of the Long Now” in the Texas desert, intended to run for 10,000 years and give humanity a sense of the long term. But the project loses some of its charm when you discover that it is being financed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. His employees, rushing about all day in their overheated warehouses, are unlikely to be comforted by it.

P.-S.

Translated by George Miller

Mona Chollet is a member of Le Monde diplomatique’s editorial team

[1] Fernando Trías de Bes, The Time Seller : a Business Satire, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2007.

[5] Quoted in Paul Bouffartigue, Temps de travail et temps de vie : Les nouveaux visages de la disponibilité temporelle (Time for work andtime for living : the new faces of temporal availability), PressesUniversitaires de France, 2012.